To Read Upon the Death of Beloved Friskey

Tragic a death so young,
Oh, so young,
She was nearly twenty-one.
Brought home like Jesus
In a towel, like my brother and I
Had won, duped our mom,
Our kitten relieved her bowels lightly
In my arms
As if she had known them her whole,
Short life.

She spent her later years
As a fractured cat,
On as many medications as my mother,
Having survived several illnesses:
Kitty diabetes, the way she got so fat
When in college I would stay away
For eight months at a time;
Kitty arthritis, how she battles daily,
Outlining every movement
With a tired feline-line;

There were the years we could not let her outside.

She soon lost her hearing, felt life
Through vibration alone,
And my brother found it darling fun
To raise his voice to her, close by her ear,
As an ignoramus speaks to a foreigner.

At the very end you often saw her
Cat-pawing around the dining room,
Carefully inspecting the floor
Like searching for defects in wood-grain.
Eventually she found a spot,
Hunched her back and,
Looking up, just peed
And scanned the room as if
She needed arms to rest in.

My two great loves
Married this summer.
Not each other, but each
Respective groom just does not meet
my standards.

He is not me!
He is just he,
His own spirit found hold
In the spaces my admiration
Carved out.

My two great loves:
The first and the last.

I have never loved another
Feverishly like her, my first.
Gropingly with clumsy hands
I undid the button of her jeans
And fondled her budding
Womanhood in every idle moment.

And never another after her,
My last, whom I never touched.

Cheers to lives
Lived without me.

the rain has just now stopped
and allows the day to begin all its light-shining,
to carry on, for rain deserves the night time.

you see: these grays were always blues and greens,
as the morning paints all the day's scenes as
the rain has just now stopped.

All these brand new leaves!

Internet Yearbook 2005

Having been away she in a hurry
Checks her emails and updates her
Browser. Now how's her MySpace,
Any adds?

A digital friend is for forever,
Finding even whether one remembers
Monica or Heather--all the better.

More often than any can know,
A human touch sits on the other side
Of a keyboard; a computer fits
More easily on the lap.

Some we know more of than ourselves
for we have held them,
measuring the space of their life in a breath.

Some we know only of:
A distant glowing city may be spotted by its smoke,
like exhaling winter onto a pane of lighted glass.

Your body is a warm furnace seen through a window.

I suppose deep down I hope,
One day, to have Garrison Keillor read a poem
I have written for my father, only when
He and I have had time to really hash it out
after he is dead: I will write
With sadness a verse about that winter you waged war
With the thick ice
The plow could not scrape up, and how I would find you
in the corner of the driveway, dutifully spreading salt
As if scattering ashes.